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OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

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Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#661

Post by bobro »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #310
nojs wrote: post #231

I think people are massively underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future. They generated $4.3B in revenue without any advertising program to monetise their 700 million weekly active users, most of whom use the free product. Google earns essentially all of its revenue from ads, $264B in 2024. ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point, and numerous ways of inserting sponsored results…

I also wonder if this means that even paid tiers will get ads. Google's ad revenue is only ~$30 per user per year, yet there is no paid, ad-free Google Premium, even though lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience. There's no Google Premium because Google's ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users; it's heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users m…

Imagine if you are paying to publish an ad. One ad platform sends your ad to everyone, the other allows the most affluent users to avoid ads. If you choose the platform where affluent people won’t see your ad, you’re likely shooting yourself in the foot.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#662

Post by mannyv »

JCM9 wrote: post #8

These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.

No, they're not.

$4.3B in revenue is tremendous.

What are you comparing them to?

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#663

Post by NBJack »

jofzar wrote: post #470
asa400 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure? Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that peopl…

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. Would have agreed with you untill I saw the meltdown of people losing their "friend" when chatgpt 5 was released. Somehow openai has fallen into a "sticky" userbase.

Wrong kind of stickiness, I'm afraid.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#664

Post by exasperaited »

typpilol wrote: post #357
exasperaited wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the IMO not exactly settled question of whether an advertiser is comfortable handing over its marketing to an AI. Can any AI be sensibly and reliably instructed not to do product placement in inappropriate contexts?

Also what effect will these extra instructions have on output? Every token of context can drastically change the output. That's a big issue right now with Claude and their long conversation reminders.

You mean, for instance, if you ask it to insert an advert into content, can it do so, based on its training set, without changing the wider content into advertorial?

It's a really good point. And it has some horrifying potential outcomes for advertisers.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#665

Post by NBJack »

mattio wrote: post #517
asa400 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure? Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that peopl…

Currently their moat is history. Why I keep coming back to ChatGPT is it ‘remembers’ our previous chats, so I don’t have to explain things over and over again. And this history builds up over time.

Not sure how this argues their moat. The context window in pretty small (at best 192k on 5 with the right subscription). Once you run past it, history is lost or becomes gimmicky. Gemini 2.5 Pro by contrast offers 1M. Llama 4 offers 10M (though seems to perform substantially worse).

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#666

Post by anthonypasq »

sumeno wrote: post #213
anthonypasq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they could keep the current model in chatGPT the same forver and 99% of users wouldnt know or care, and unless you think hardware isnt going to improve, the cost of that will basically decrease to 0.

This just doesn't match with the claims that people are using it as a replacement for Google. If your facts are out of date you're useless as a search engine

all these models just use web search now to stay up to date. knowledge cutoffs arent as important. also fine tuning new data into the base model after the fact is way cheaper than having to retrain the whole thing from scratch

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#667

Post by abustamam »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #569
bashtoni wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, everyone refers to a vacuum as a 'hoover'. They are not the dominant vacuum brand there despite the massive name recognition.

I'm not sure if physical products are analogous to internet services. If all it took to vacuum your house was typing "Hoover" into a browser, and everyone called vacuums "a Hoover," then I would expect Hoover to have 90% of the vacuum market share. But since buying a vacuum usually involves going to a store, looking at available devices, and paying for them, the value of a brand name is less significant.

Pre-pandemic, at least in my social circles, "Skype" was the term for video calling. "Hey, wanna Skype?" and we'd hop on a discord call.

Post-pandemic, at work and such, "Zoom" has become synonymous for work call. Whether it's via Slack or Google Meet, or even Zoom, we use the term Zoom.

I don't know what the market share is on Skype (Pre-pandemic) or Zoom, but these common terms appear to exist for software.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#668

Post by abustamam »

wltr wrote: post #462
chii wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when people started referring to searching the internet as googling, they know their brand has made it. It is the same with chatGPT.

Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for…

I cheekily refer to it as Al (like, short for Albert) because Google seems to love to shove Al's overviews in my search results.

But when I'm being more serious I'd usually just say "I asked GPT"

I have a colleague who just refers to AI as "Chat" which I think is kinda cute, but people also use the term "chat" to refer to... Like, people, or "yall". Or to their stream chat.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#669

Post by jzl »

DetroitThrow wrote: post #646
jzl wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at t…

>was probably not exaggerated by 10x. "The people spreading obvious lies must have a reasonable basis in their lying"?

I don’t think any of these are “obvious” lies. Maybe meta offered someone a $75M package and it got reported as $100M. So they can say with a straight face that the reporting is “false”, yet they never countered with any details.

You’re ignoring my point about the legitimate reason people might be getting offers in this stratosphere. No one has debunked or refuted the general reporting, at least not that I’ve seen. If you have a source, show it please.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#670

Post by hollerith »

wltr wrote: post #462
chii wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when people started referring to searching the internet as googling, they know their brand has made it. It is the same with chatGPT.

Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for…

I recently used "an unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions" in a comment here. I think I will keep on using it.
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